Lara Khalaf interviewed Paul Cheese at TedX Tunbridge Wells 2017

Lara Khalaf: Good afternoon, everyone and welcome to Business First UD and we're here in Cambridge Wells today. We have a big event that start at two o'clock, so it's been going on for a few hours and I have the privilege of having Paul Cheese here with us, who's gonna be explaining what's all about his talk today. So, Paul, welcome to the show.Paul Cheese: Hi. Hi, Lara. How you doing? Lara Khalaf: I'm doing fantastic. How are you?Paul Cheese: Good. Very good.Lara Khalaf: Yeah? How you feeling?Paul Cheese: Really, really good, on edge, ready, nervous, excitement. Here we go.Lara Khalaf: Yeah? Okay and so tell us who are you, Paul.Paul Cheese: I'm a sound producer, a teacher. I get out on my bike and combine all of those three things in one.Lara Khalaf: It sounds very, very simple. You just get out on your bike and you just ... But it has to be more than that. Tell a little bit more.Paul Cheese: So I've been working with different bands for more years than I can remember and I play live in a band as well as solo musician myself and teach. I talk about that as well. I teach. Yes and then sort of combining these things. One year I was lucky enough to be snowboarding and I took my guitar to the top of the mountain. I'll never forget singing and playing as loud as I possibly could with the mountain peaks disappearing into the distance. I thought, "Hang on. This is combining kind of things that I love doing with music." So the following year, I had an ambition of what if I went out of my front door and turned left and kept going?Lara Khalaf: What happened then?Paul Cheese: Seven days later, I ended up in Land's End.Lara Khalaf: All right. Just like that.Paul Cheese: With a very sore bottom because of the cycling. Anyway, so then I thought, well why not combine finding these interesting locations that are on my bike. Like with the snowboarding, I could put the two together with music and with the bike. So that's why I decided then to cycle to the four corners of Britain and take my recording studio with me.Lara Khalaf: Wow. Wow, so talking about sounds and locations, where has it been that your most exciting sound or what has been your most exciting sound and your most exciting location that you've been?Paul Cheese: Beginning this year, I was recording in the Grand Canyon and just hearing the delays of sound and echoes of the sound within there and Arches National Park in Utah and some of the giant stacks of Navajo sound stone standing a certain distance away to be able to play around with the echoes and the decays and just playing with rhythms, bouncing off that, it's something that's gonna be with my forever. It's fantastic, but then also standing at the top of a mountain. I cycled up to the St Bernard Pass in Switzerland. Again, just see all these mountain peaks disappearing off and the little road that you've cycled up just disappearing down and then just making some noise.Lara Khalaf: Oh wow. Wow, wow, so let's go back to TEDx for a second. How did you end up here?Paul Cheese: I don't know.Lara Khalaf: Good answer.Paul Cheese: No, I'm just very lucky to be chosen, really, and a few people put my name forward and just to be in the company of people like your good self and others, it just, yeah. Good chance to make some noise.Lara Khalaf: So here's a question for you. What would you like your audience today to leave the room thinking or feeling?Paul Cheese: To be thinking about sound, to be thinking about when they turn the kettle on or when the dishwasher's going [dishwasher sound 00:03:42] and just got a rhythm there, just thinking about sounds differently or thinking about beats and rhythms like that.Lara Khalaf: Does that mean that actually that we could also make some music?Paul Cheese: Yes. Absolutely.Lara Khalaf: Fantastic. Okay.Paul Cheese: Absolutely. I've recently did a project with BBC Radio Kent and I got the county to send me in the sounds in their life.Lara Khalaf: Wow.Paul Cheese: So I've sent sewing machines, dishwashers, cats, dogs, brass players, you name it, it came in and I created a soundscape out of that. So it's possible. You can do it yourself.Lara Khalaf: And I also read that some of your music is on Itunes. IS that correct?Paul Cheese: Yes. Yeah. I'm on Itunes and on Spotify. Check me out. It's Paul Cheese.Lara Khalaf: Fantastic. Thank you so much Paul. Thank you so much. See you around. Thank you for listening.